Liberal Democrat campaign launched! Dodgy statistics alert!

The Liberal Democrats have had a campaign launch in the heart of Huntingdon (this is a St Neots centred blog). This is under the banner of:

Change that works for the East of England; Change that works for Huntingdon

The Liberal Democrats say:

Our policies for the East Of England announced yesterday by Nick Clegg include:

• Thousands of residents will be freed from paying any income tax at all, while almost everyone else gets £700 back
• £230m extra for local schools to cut class sizes and provide more one-to-one tuition
• An end to unfair tuition fees
• Around 26,000 empty homes brought back into use
• 200+ extra police on your streets

This is talking about the whole of the East of England which includes Bedfordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. So how does the effect Cambridgeshire? or even Huntingdonshire? I would like to know.

The Liberal Democrats also said:
"We have steadily inproved our performance in Huntingdon over the last nne years, coming from third to second and doubling our share of the vote. We will make even greater progress this time!"

9 years ago, at the 2001 General Election, the Liberal Democrats were actually second with 23.9% of the vote. At the 2005 General Election this share increased by 2.4% to 26.3%. Hardly doubling!

Now if you go back 13 years then the Liberal Democrats have moved from 3rd to 2nd. They have nearly, but not quite, doubled their vote. For this statistic to work I have to go back ton 18 years to 1992 when they had 12.8%.

Under the campaign manager of Martin Land, the Liberal Democrats haven't really been improving by the amount the Liberal Democrats want us to believe. They want their campaign

Source: Wikipedia.

To make even greater progress the Liberal Democrats need to do better than second. That means first. They also said they doubled their share of the vote so they have to exceed 52.6% of the vote. A very high standard to achieve.